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If, despite numerous quotes from the Founding Fathers to the contrary, the United States is a Christian nation, and, though Christianity as it has generally come to be known is more influenced by Paul than anyone else, what Jesus says trumps what Paul says, and what the Bible says Jesus said is what he really said, then there’s this thought:

It is generally conceded and accepted that it is the rich who rule this country. That’s what the 1% is about, or the 99% or 98%. Continue reading →

“A new pope will change nothing. Not a woman, not an African, not a Latin, not a nice guy. In fact, if anything is to change, the first thing that needs to happen is no pope, and certainly not an infallible one.”

So I said at the height of the hype that surrounded Pope Francis’s election. Church watchers noted that he was a humble man who cooked for himself, took public transport and lived in an ordinary apartment. But despite Francis’s example, no cardinal has followed his lead and moved out of his palace or given up his limo. He challenged the use of church property for profit, telling refugees at a pastoral meeting in a Jesuit center in Rome that “empty convents and monasteries should not be turned into hotels by the church to earn money.” Without doubt that’s what Jesus would do—but it’s unlikely that the pope’s words will lead the bishops to be so generous. US bishops are more likely to seek government funds to feed the poor and shelter the homeless than sell off their considerable real estate holdings. After all, about 54 percent of Catholic Charities’ funding comes from federal and state governments, not church coffers.

But let’s not quibble. Good things are happening. The pope has reined in the Vatican bank, moving it toward compliance with European standards of transparency. He’s the first pope to appoint a formal advisory council of cardinals and laud collegiality in decision-making. And he warmly received theologian Gustavo Gutiérrez, an early proponent of liberation theology. (As far as progressive pope watchers are concerned, his only widely noted lapse seems to be his decision not to drop the investigation of the US Leadership Conference of Women Religious and board the nuns’ bus.)

But then Pope Francis went beyond making symbolic man-bites-dog news in a 12,000-word freewheeling, but clearly strategic, interview that appeared in Jesuit magazines around the world. The pope offered an astonishing window into how he sees the church hierarchy—that is, the bishops, who are by tradition feudal princes in their dioceses—and where that hierarchy is failing. He made clear that the bishops are not the church; the church is us—and it is a big tent. “This church…is the home of all, not a small chapel that can hold only a small group of selected people,” he said. “We must not reduce the bosom of the universal church to a nest protecting our mediocrity.”

John Paul II and Benedict XVI, Francis’s predecessors, put “rules” above people, seemingly ready to abandon all who disagreed with them in favor of an obedient set of true believers. This pope tells us wounds will be healed rather than inflicted. Each person’s dignity will be respected. The words had special meaning for Catholics, but they resonated with many Americans who intuitively grasped their political significance for the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, which has played such a sorry role in the polarization that permeates our public life.

It’s this critique of the ugly underside of Catholic clerical politics that is rightly making news. Francis is scathing in his reprimand of the modus operandi of the US bishops. “We [the church] cannot insist only on issues related to abortion, gay marriage and the use of contraceptive methods…. It is not necessary to talk about these issues all the time,” he told his interviewer. These words put in sharp relief the US bishops’ extremism on abortion, typified by Cardinal Bernard Law’s claim that abortion is the “primordial evil”; or that gay marriage is a nonnegotiable political no-no, but Paul Ryan’s budget deserves respect. Only in America are bishops this unrelentingly harsh—bullies when it comes to sex, women and reproduction.

This obsession is so deep, it’s likely not even the pope can get through. After all, these bishops were appointed by the last two popes precisely for their conservatism. That’s not to say that the pope’s words—and his attempt to move the American church away from the war on women—are not welcome. The culture war mentality has not only damaged the people who engage in it; it has deformed civic life. To have a leader of one of the worst-offending institutions reject it inspires hope. And hopefulness is what religion at its best is about. Imagine if the bishops preached from that which is best in humanity rather than that which is worst.

It would be better still if there were no pope, no infallibility and no bishops with fiefdoms, and if a democratic church emerged. In that church, same-sex marriage would be celebrated, contraception would be the prelude to responsible parenthood and abortion would be understood as a necessary right. It is no accident that many Christian denominations without pope have moved in that direction.

Like the vast majority of Christian religious leaders of his era, Martin Luther, the Father of the Protestant Reformation, met the definition of a “Constantinian” Christian, that is a Christian who espoused theological teachings that were tolerant of violence and accepted non-democratic, authoritarian and male-dominant practices. Those teachings represented the theological framework of the Christian church that became the state religion starting with the reign of the Roman Emperor Constantine in the early Fourth Century.

Luther also was an Augustinian monk, an order named after Augustine of Hippo, who died in 430 and was later canonized by the Roman Catholic Church. St. Augustine regarded the nonviolent ethical teachings of Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount as simply metaphorical and therefore irrelevant in times of crisis. Augustine epitomized Constantinian Christianity, and Luther was a good student of Augustine.

Indeed, most of the influential religious leaders of the 1500s (including Luther, John Calvin, Henry VIII and the various popes) seemed to have an unwritten ecumenical agreement that you could kill one another and still be following Jesus. A cursory reading of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation Wars that drenched Europe in the blood of Christian killing Christian in the 16th Century will attest to that statement.

Constantinian-type Christianity (in stark contrast to Sermon on the Mount Christianity, which was the original form of that religion and the norm during the first few generations of its existence) follows a number of aberrant, anti-gospel, violence-tolerant church teachings that had been blessed by the murderous Emperor Constantine. Many of those teachings were made doctrinal by Augustine.

Constantine, it should be pointed out, was a ruthless military dictator who had rivals and even had members of his family killed. He was never a Christian in his lifetime and only consented to being baptized when he was on his deathbed. Augustine shaped his theology to be in conformity with the authoritarian, obedience-demanding, pro-violence, justified-war politics of the emperor; and Luther followed suit.

The Lutheran Church

Luther’s reformation attempts created great schisms in Christianity when he tried to reform a corrupted Roman Catholic Church by endorsing violent means and therefore predictably failed to bring any peaceful Christ-like transformation to the “reformed” church. (See the horrific details of the massacres in the Peasant’s War of 1525 – that Luther endorsed and that ruthlessly put down a peasant’s liberation movement.)

I was born and raised Lutheran but have always been uncomfortable with Lutheranism’s tendencies towards conservative politics, conservative theologies, flag-waving patriotism and teachings that tend to justify (or be silent about) American war-making. (Those tendencies are also prevalent in other American Protestant churches.)

After considerable study of the history and theology of the earliest form of Christianity, I now know that the Protestant church’s simplistic acceptance of their nation’s wars is totally contrary to the ethical teachings of the nonviolent Jesus which was faithfully taught by the earliest communities of faith.

After being confronted with these truths about the early pacifist church, my theology and politics have both moved to the opposite end of the theological spectrum of the church of my birth, toward the left-wing, pacifist, anti-fascist, nonviolent teachings of Jesus and Martin Luther King, Jr. and away from the traditional violence-justifying doctrines of Augustine and Martin Luther.

In Luther’s defense however, he did make three insightful statements which resonate with me and which give me some hope that the Protestant churches might wake up some day and start teaching what Jesus taught.

As has been the experience of so many other non-violent (and therefore anti-war) Christian activists, King’s commitment to the Sermon on the Mount ethics of Jesus has shaped my response to America’s current Bush/Obama foreign policies of aggressive militarism and perpetual war (and the inevitable civilian deaths, refugeeism, starvation, pestilence and the spiritual and economic bankruptcy of the nations that participate in war).

Failing to Preach the Gospel

Here are three statements from the writings of Martin Luther, which Martin Luther King would have approved:

–”The church that preaches the gospel in all of its fullness, except as it applies to the great social ills of the day, is failing to preach the gospel.”

–”War is the greatest plague that can afflict humanity; it destroys religions, it destroys states, it destroys families. Any scourge is preferable to it.”

–And then this profoundly important exchange, in which Luther taught one of his followers to trust the ethics of the gospel rather than the threats from his war-making government and courageously become a selective conscientious objector to war.

The questioner asked: “Suppose my lord was wrong in going to war?”

Luther: “If you know for sure that he is wrong, then you should fear God rather than men (Acts 5:29), and you should neither fight nor serve. For you cannot have a good conscience before God.”

Questioner: “Oh, no, you say, my lord would force me to do it; he would take away my fief and would not give me my money, pay and wages. Besides I would be despised and put to shame as a coward, even worse as a man who did not keep his word and deserted his lord in time of need.”

Luther: “I answer: You must take that risk and, with God’s help, let whatever happens, happen. He can restore you a hundred fold as he promises in the gospel…”

I suspect that Luther’s wisdom in those statements developed in his later years, for surely a more spiritually mature Luther would have recognized the suffering of the impoverished and oppressed peasants (that ultimately led to the Peasant’s War of 1525) as one of the great social ills of his day.

In the years immediately prior to 1525, the peasants, inspired by Luther’s anti-church/anti-establishment revolutionary teachings, were finally rising up against their perennial oppressors: the ruling elite, the wealthy landowners and the authoritarian Catholic Church.

Initially the peasants protested nonviolently. They submitted written demands that they be granted their human rights. Tragically, as is still happening in these modern times, the protest movement was brutally put down by the establishment’s obedient soldiers and the peasants were compelled to resort to defensive violence, which ended badly for them (shades of the recent nonviolent protests in Egypt and Syria.)

Luther’s Betrayal of the Peasants

Luther shocked the peasants when he betrayed them and sided with the one percent ruling elite, whose well-armed soldiers slaughtered them in that brief war. Luther forever lost the support of the peasantry when he actually called for their annihilation. Luther wrote in a tract:

“These are strange times, when a prince can achieve heaven by killing peasants more assuredly than other men can with prayer.”

The reality that the briefly optimistic peasants hadn’t comprehended was that their oppressors were the very ones that had protected Luther from being hunted down and killed by the soldiers of the pope.

Any thoughtful, fair-minded, ethical American must conclude that the Bush/Cheney administration’s stated 2001 foreign policy of perpetual war and the continuation of unaffordable, bloated military budgets are two of the great social ills of our time. But war (despite the rape, pillage, starvation and destitution that inevitably goes along with it) seems to be a taboo subject in most of the churches of which I am familiar.

Modern wars can justifiably be described as organized mass slaughter that mostly kills and maims innocent civilians. It is a sobering reality that 80 to 90 percent of the casualties of modern warfare are unarmed non-combatant civilians, largely women and children.

The failure to protect non-combatants in war, according to the Christian Just War Theory, makes that war an unjust one – and, in terms of the teachings of moral theology, that makes the killing in that war murder. And that, of course, makes the planners, perpetrators and participants in such wars murderers or accomplices to murder.

Martin Luther King Echoed Jesus

The heroic martyr Martin Luther King, whose prophetic work was modeled after the pacifist Jesus and the pacifist Gandhi (and not, despite his name, the war-justifying Luther), often commented on what was expected of faithful and ethical Christians in their response to injustice. King’s views are best summarized by these profound but simple truths about silence in the face of evil:

–”It may well be that the greatest tragedy of this period of social change is not the glaring noisiness of the so-called bad people, but the silence of the so-called good people.”

–“The church must be reminded that it is not the master or the servant of the state, but rather the conscience of the state. It must be the guide and the critic of the state, and never its tool. If the church does not recapture its prophetic zeal, it will become an irrelevant social club without moral or spiritual authority.”

–”Cowardice asks the question – is it safe? Expediency asks the question – is it politic? Vanity asks the question – is it popular? But conscience asks the question – is it right? And there comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular; but one must take it because it is right.”

Luther’s three insightful observations above are as clear as could be, as are the statements of King. The church of Jesus Christ should be paying attention to all of these ethical statements simply because they are corollaries to Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount commands to “love your enemies” and “do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” If the follower of Jesus takes these statements seriously, violence against “the other” is impossible.

A few months before his assassination on April 4, 1968, King said he didn’t want all his achievements mentioned at his funeral. What he wanted said instead was this: “Say that Martin King tried to feed the hungry, clothe the naked and that he was right on the war question.”

The vast majority of American Christian churches are silent – and therefore wrong – on the war questions. Even Luther’s statements on war justifiably indict them for failing to preach the full gospel.

Most of the Lutheran, Catholic and Reformed churches of the Third Reich were equally silent – and wrong – about the wars of both Kaiser Wilhelm and Hitler. And, of course both the Catholic and Protestant Churches in Christian Germany were silent – and therefore wrong – on the Jewish question.

It seems to me that true peace churches should be modeling themselves after the primitive, pacifist church of the first two centuries by courageously speaking out against wars and the inevitable cruelty, torture and slaughter that always occurs in wartime.

True peace churches should be warning about the deadly spiritual consequences for both the warriors and their victims. True peace churches should be teaching what Jesus taught about violence (forbidden) and advise their members to refuse to participate in homicidal violence of any kind.

Idealistic peace churches, sadly, represent only a tiny fraction of the churches in America, and they have no choice but to be vocal. To be silent would make them complicit with evil.

When Silence Is Betrayal

Martin Luther King understood the consequences for whistle-blowers and prophets if and when they speak out for peace and justice. He said: “There comes a time when silence is betrayal…but the calling to speak is often a vocation of agony.”

King believed in the truth and practicality of the nonviolent teachings of Jesus, and, like Jesus, lived that way. And, contrary to the objectives of their assassins, neither their spirits nor their teachings died with them. Both are very much alive, and their spirits and inspiring words live on.

And for those who claim discipleship to the Jesus of the gospels, it should be ethically impossible to adopt the pro-violence stances of the multitude of non-peace churches, whose punitive politics and harsh theologies over the past 1,700 years have tragically dominated the Christian Church.

Jesus often taught about the coming of the Reign of God, which was all about the unconditional, nonviolent love of friends and enemies. He taught his disciples how they should live, how they should love and how they should respond when they were tempted to participate in or be silent about forms of violence such as militarism, racism, economic oppression, torture, cruelty, hunger and killling.

It is clear what Jesus taught. In so many words, he was saying that “violence is forbidden to those who wish to follow me.” The planet and the creatures trying to survive on it are in peril if the church of Martin Luther, Martin Luther King Jr. and Jesus of Nazareth continues to fail in its sacred duty to actively and nonviolently resist – and courageously speak out against – war and violence.

I (R.e. Glenn a.k.a. The Philosopher Monk) was elated to find myself in a discussion today. I love them. Civil, open-minded ones, anyway. And I decided to post it, and to create a new category in this project that will be called “The Dialogues”. And, it would seem, this is the first one Continue reading →

The Gospel of Thomas, and the other gnostic gospels that we now have, was discovered in Egypt in 1945, near a town called Nag Hammadi (hence the name Nag Hammadi Library). Of all the Gospels in that collection, Thomas is considered to be the most important one, and some have suggested that it is a candidate for the theoretical Q gospel that Matthew and Luke, using a copy of Mark and this Q gospel, wrote their gospels with. It’s importance is derived from the fact that a lot of the sayings are found in the canonical (accepted) gospels in the bible, although there is a lot that isnt. Another reason why it is so important, or relevant, is because it’s not a narrative gospel like those found in the Bible, it is a collection of sayings. So, if authentic, (and it has been dated back to the early Christian centuries (the copy they found in Nag Hammadi is written in a language called Coptic, and they know that the copy we have was a copy and translation from greek, which most accept was the language that the gospel was originally written in, just like the New Testament Gospels were written in Greek. Continue reading →

While non-religious people tend to reject religion because they find the evidence for a supernatural deity unconvincing, a new study shows that rejecting religion can be good not just logically, but emotionally.

While previous studies had suggested some emotional and social value to being religious, a new study that examined a huge number of people from around the world discovered that being religious is a risk factor for depression. As explained by the Huffington Post, [3] over 8,000 people from different countries from the UK to Chile, had their levels of religiosity measured. The study covered various economic and social groups and looked at the relationship between religiosity and depression. Continue reading →

In the two years leading up to his death this past February, the legal and political philosopher Ronald Dworkin was completing a slim volume with a weighty title. Religion without God, which began as a series of lectures in 2011, set a lofty goal: to propose a “religious attitude” in the absence of belief. Dworkin’s objective was not just theological. The book, he hoped, would help lower the temperature in the past decade’s battle between a group of scientists and philosophers dubbed the New Atheists and an array of critics who have accused them of everything from Islamophobia to fundamentalism to heresy. Continue reading →

A friend and I ended up finding ourselves in a heated discussion regarding, among other diverse topics, Jesus and the concept of the messiah in history. When I had mentioned that Jesus wasn't the only one claiming, whether he said it himself or others said it about him, to be the promised/prophesied messiah. The one with the capital “M”. He seemed amazed when I had mentioned that there were several others around the time (1st century CE) who were performing miracles, leading and teaching followers, having the mantle of 'messiah' attatched to them, and who, in many such cases, ended their lives under the execution of crucifixion.

His response felt like an indignant attack on what he seemed to see as a completely ridiculous, idiotic, how-could-you-be-even-remotely-serious thought and how dare I even bring up such an unfounded conspiracy theory. He said, “NAMES! Tell me their names! If they existed, tell me their names!”

At the time, I didn't have the time to go through my library to provide him some names, but that's what I'll attempt to do here. Keep in mind that this isn't an exhaustive, or even remotely complete listing, just a few examples of Jesus-like persons around the time that Jesus and the Jewish state were in apocalyptic “end times” tumult.

It is a miracle that we know anything at all about the man called Jesus of Nazareth. The itinerant preacher wandering from village to village clamoring about the end of the world, a band of ragged followers trailing behind, was a common sight in Jesus's time–so common, in fact, that it had become a kind of charicature among the Roman elite. In a farcical passage about just such a figure, the Greek philosopher Celsus imagines a Jewish holy man roaming the Galilean countryside, shouting to no one in particular: “I am God, or the servant of God, or a divine spirit. But I am coming, for the world is already in the throes of destruction. And you will soon see me coming with the power of heaven.”

The first century was an era of apocalyptic expectation among the Jews of Palestine, the Roman designation for the vast tract of land encompassing modern-day Israel/Palestine as well as large parts of Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon. Countless prophets, preachers and messiahs trampted through the Holy Land delivering messages of God's imminent judgment. Many of these so-called false messiahs we know by name. A few are even mentioned in the New Testament. The prophet Theudas, according to the book of Acts, had four hundred disciples before Rome captured him and cut off his head. A mysterious charismatic figure known only as “the Egyptian” raised an army of followers in the desert, nearly all of whom were massacred by Roman troops. In 4 B.C.E., the year in which most scholars believe Jesus of Nazareth was born, a poor shepherd named Athronges put a diadem on his head and crowned himself “King of the Jews”; he and his followers were brutally cut down by a legion of soldiers. Another messianic aspirant, called simply “the Samaritan,” was crucified by Pontius Pilate even though he raised no army and in no way challenged Rome–an indication that the authorities, sensing the apocalyptic fever in the air, had become extremely sensitive to any hint of sedition. There was Hezekiah the bandit chief, Simon of Peraea, Judas the Galilean, his grandson Menahem, Simon son of Giora, and Simon son of Kochba–all of whom declared messianic ambitions and all of whom were executed by Rome for doing so.

Excerpted from: “Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth” by Reza Aslan [Text above can be found in the Introduction.]

The genealogy of Jesus is listed twice in the New Testament, once in Matthew and again in Luke. It’s important to list because the descent along the bloodline from King David was a vital qualification for the messiah, just like it was important that the messiah be born, or come from, Bethlehem. The list in Matthew goes back all the way to Abraham (as founder of Israel). However, the one in Luke lists the descent all the way back to the first man, Adam. It’s revealing as to the intent of the authors for how they presented their lists: Matthew was reinforcing and focusing on the aspect of Jesus’ descent from King David, while Luke was presenting and attempting to justify Jesus as a “New Adam”. Continue reading →

Even though that title probably grabbed your attention, and immediate bias, I promise that it wasn’t chosen just for “shock value”, but is the best general way to sum up my thought, and, by the end, whether you agree or not, you’ll understand why it’s the title.

Now, a necessary bit of background:

The Gospel of Mark is generally thought to be the earliest written of the gospels in the New Testament, with Matthew and Luke, and later John, coming after. Mark, Matthew and Luke are known as the ‘synoptic gospels’ because they are so similar in style and content. The consensus is that the authors of Matthew and Luke probably sat down with a copy of Mark and a copy of another gospel (usually labeled the “Q” gospel, from the German word for ‘source’: Quelle) and wrote their books from them. So, if a story is…